The year is 1750.  In a struggle with the French for control of North America the British expel 913 French-speaking Acadians from present day Nova Scotia to Annapolis, Maryland.  At that time the city has but one thousand residents, mostly British.  The French-Acadians are seen as unwanted interlopers, as foreigners sent but not asked for.  The normally open and welcoming Marylanders stiffen, throwing up a psychological unwanted sign.
The French call this the “Great Expulsion,” the “Great Upheaval,” or, more elegantly, “Le Grand Dérangement.”  Over a period of time exceeding two hundred years an academic argument continues over whether these Great Expulsions are comparable to contemporary ethnic cleansing.  One historian compares the Acadian Exodus to the retreating Russians who burnt their own lands before Napoleon’s invasion, and compares the British expulsions by the French in Newfoundland in 1697 to General Sherman’s destruction of everything in his path as his army marched unchallenged across Georgia during the American Civil War.
Historian John Mack Faragher compares the Acadian expulsions to contemporary ethnic cleansing.  Two other historians, Naomi E.S. Griffiths and A.J.B. Johnston write that the event is comparable to other deportations in history, and do not consider it to be ethnic cleansing.  He writes further that evidence indicates that since the British regarded the Acadians as a military threat the deportation of 1755 does not qualify as an act of ethnic cleansing.  And, finally, Johnston says that it was a cleansing but not an ethnic cleansing because the British cared more about religious adherence than about ethnicity, the Acadians having refused to swear allegiance to Protestant England.
There were two major waves of expulsion of the Acadians.  In the first wave they were deported to other British colonies.  During the second wave they were deported to England and France, from where they migrated to Louisiana.  Essential to mention as deportation destinations are Maryland, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Virginia, Carolinas and Georgia, and France and England.
In 1847, American writer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published his epic poem Evangeline, based loosely on events surrounding the 1755 deportation.  The poem became an American classic both in Maritime Canada and in Louisiana.  The Acadians who settled in Louisiana, known as Cajuns (an adulteration of Acadians) have had a dominant cultural influence in many parishes, particularly in the southwestern area of the state known as Acadiana.
Before the deportation, the Acadian population was estimated at 14,000.  Most were deported but some Acadians escaped to Quebec or hid among the Mi’kmaq (Indians) or in the countryside to avoid deportation until the situation settled down.
In the first wave of the expulsions most Acadians were assigned to rural communities in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the Carolinas.  In general they refused to stay where they were put and large numbers of them migrated to the colonial port cities where they gathered in isolated, poor French-speaking Catholic neighborhoods, the sort of communities British officials tried to discourage.  In addition, some Acadians threatened to migrate north to French-controlled regions, including the Saint John River, Ile Royale, the coasts of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and Canada.  Because the British believed that their policy of sending the Acadians to the Thirteen Colonies had failed, they deported the Acadians to France and England in the second wave of the Expulsion.
All of this is set against the backdrop of the French and Indian War.  The Expulsions (1755-1763) occurred during this war, in which the French Canadians and the indigenous Indians of southeastern Canada—Nova Scotia and New Brunswick notably—fought the British in their struggle to control and colonize, if possible, all of North America.  Approximately 11,500 Acadians were deported by the British.
Just north east of the Bay of Fundy lies Scots Bay and at the bottom of that sits the little town of Grand Pré.  From this town came the Bellefontaine family of Longfellow’s Evangeline.  Grand Pré means Large Meadow and it is from this pastoral scene that comes the Acadian family of Martin, the family of our story.